Andi Velgos, who earned an MFA from RISD in Jewelry and Metalsmithing, makes beautiful, delicate pieces that are part backyard relics, part entomology class.  Her wearable art is a tiny zoo of deconstruction: half-melted brooches, statement rings that mimic metamorphosis, crafted from copper, stainless steel, resin, rubber, and paper.

Velgos explores her aesthetic on her website’s artist statement: “Making their homes on ailing trees, logs andforest floors, peculiar organisms—richly diverse in form, scale, color and texture—adorn the spaces in which they grow. My jewelry explores this mysterious realm of natural oddities and the delicate visual balance between the beautiful and grotesque. Building with lines and color, I attempt to break down and decipher elements of these organisms, translating forms into adorning growths for the human body. I work from photographs of nature, dissecting, disintegrating, and ultimately eliminating each image altogether in exchange for a new species. My work evolves—in scale, in complexity, and with the body—as each new species plays the role of both a fictional possibility and a tangible object of adornment.”